Maya Hewitt

My work exists as a web of interlinking narratives. Painted on panels which are grouped together within a space, they form singular, large-scale installations. Fully encasing the walls of the space, each installation intends to create an immerse environment where multiple stories coexist on each picture plane.

The structural alterations of the gallery for each show become symptomatic of both my studio practice and the viewers experience of the work. The intension is to not only replicate the feeling of my studio environment within the gallery, but also, to deny the viewer the opportunity to fully step back from the painting, creating a claustrophobic space in which one cannot help but become a participant in the unfolding narrative surrounding them. Rather than being a backdrop, the work is invasive. The onlooker is intimately close, also exposing the physical process of painting: brush strokes, pencil graft rubbings, hairs trapped in paint. The 'illusion' of painting falls apart and is at once regained.

The work externalizes subtexts and events occurring beneath the surface of everyday human interactions. Evolved from a gap between childish fantasy and adult interpretation, fragments of memories and notions of power and desire are fought. The construction of unreal spaces and unworldly sites drawn from points of spectral encounter. Across these spaces there are multiple shifts in scale, between figures and objects, where constructs of intensive populated micro-landscapes, encoded narrative webs and sites underpinned by minute detail and plural mythologies exist. The painted figures appear and recur through shifting cycles as perpetual incarnations of themselves.

The work draws on a site of contemporary renovation in which considerations of chronology, history and artefact are dislocated, reconfigured and represented to form a new mythology. Narrative structures are created and influenced through my painting process itself, which involves the constant editing and scraping away of previously painted layers. The basic struggle of linear correctness combined with the content often gives rise to evolving narratives and hybrid scenarios.

Borrowing from fantasy to depict the un-articulated and unseen, the paintings increasingly occupy a site of collective representation of excess and ephemera that serving as signatories of a physical and actual world.

www.mayahewitt.com